Essays in Philosophy

Volume 5
Issue 2 Animal Ethics

Article 19

6-1-2004

Review of Thomist Realism and the Linguistic

Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence
Joseph W. Koterski
S.J. Fordham University

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Recommended Citation
Koterski, Joseph W. (2004) "Review of Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence," Essays
in Philosophy: Vol. 5: Iss. 2, Article 19.

Essays in Philosophy is a biannual journal published by Pacific University Library | ISSN 1526-0569 | http://commons.pacificu.edu/eip/

Review of Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More

Perfect Form of Existence

This book review is available in Essays in Philosophy: http://commons.pacificu.edu/eip/vol5/iss2/19

Essays in Philosophy

Essays in Philosophy
A Biannual Journal
Vol. 5 No. 2, June 2004

Book Review
Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence, by John P.
OCallaghan. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 358, including
bibliography and index. ISBN 0-268-04217-9. Cloth $59.95
The way one sets up a problem will determine much about the type of answer one gets. In metaphysics
and epistemology as anywhere elsewhere, ones basic choices in envisioning and articulating a problem
will significantly affect ones approach to the problem as well as ones results.
This thoughtful study by John OCallaghan challenges some of the commonest assumptions of
contemporary philosophy in setting up the problem of how words express what we understand about
things. In particular, he engages the assumptions that have regularly been made ever since what
Richard Rorty has called the linguistic turn, the view that philosophical problems are really
problems of language that are best dealt with either by returning language to some ideal form or by
paying more attention to ordinary language usage. Holding traditional philosophy to have erred in
assuming the existence of a realm of objects in the mind that are the bearers of meaning, this
critique claims to find unanswerable the objection that one will never be able compare these internal
objects with their external counterparts. Any possible comparison that one would ever entertain
would only be a comparison between one mental object and another, and in this way one will never
be able to get outside the mind. Better, say the proponents of the linguistic turn, to focus on the
public character of words and language and to forget any mental realm of meanings.
By bringing to bear a considerable dexterity with the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy as
well as a rich understanding of what traditional Thomism means when it claims to espouse a robust
realism, OCallaghan tries to challenge the assumptions of those who make the linguistic turn. He
focuses in particular on Hilary Putnams philosophy of mind and theory of language. At the same
time he aims to correct what he perceives as the shortcomings of various analytic Thomists
(whom he regards as having given away the game by their choice of starting-point) even while he
tries to offer to the broader philosophical public an alternative to the old battles between empiricists
and skeptics by reflecting on the embodied status of human consciousness.
A distinction crucial for basic Thomistc epistemology and central to its articulation of many other
advanced questions in that field is the distinction between id quod and id quo, between that which
is known and that by which something is known. For the Thomist, concepts are not normally the
objects of knowledge, but are the means by which we know whatever we know about things in the
world. Except in those cases when we are inquiring about the status of what we know and are

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making our concepts the direct object of reflection, as professional philosophy often needs to do,
the Thomist envisions concepts not as what we know, but as that by which we know. This posture
allows for a different starting-point on the question of how language maps onto the world, for it
need not presume an isomorphism of the relation between language and concept with the relation
between concept and entity.
If one were to take either sense-impressions or concepts as what we know rather than as that by
which we know whatever we come to know, it is easy to see why the resulting epistemology tends
to be subject to severe problems. One will be faced with the problem of how to bridge the gap
between some external entity and whatever is in the consciousness of the knowing subject. One will
be stuck with comparing one set of appearances with some other set of appearances and will have
no way out of consciousness to things. Whether one opts for the Cartesian search for certainty,
resorts to Humean principles of association in the face of skepticism, or risks phenomenological
solipsism, any claim to philosophical realism such as Thomism makes will invariably seems naive.
OCallaghan carefully recounts the attractions of adopting some sort of critical position and the
advantages that beckon from making the linguistic turn before making his case for Thomistic
realism.
To gain a deeper sense of the entire problem, OCallaghan roots his discussion of these various
proposals in a lengthy discussion about the various interpretations that are possible for an important
passage in Aristotles De Interpretatione (namely, 16a3-9). This text offers the classical locus for
discussions about how language attaches to the world. It contains what OCallaghan labels
Aristotles semantic triangle, namely, (1) the articulated sounds of language that are signs of (2)
the passions of the soul, which are likenesses of (3) things (objects in the world). Mindful that
written language might seem to add a fourth facet to this discussion, Aristotle notes in passing that
in relation to oral speech the marks involved in any form of writing have the relation of sign to
signified. Over the centuries Aristotles commentators have found this fourth relationship
fascinating in its own right, but in some ways less problematic than the relationships that constitute
the basic semantic triad of words, concepts, and things.
One recurrent tradition of interpretation tends to treat the relation of thoughts to things as roughly
comparable to that of words to thoughts, as if both were instances of a relation of a sign to what it
signifies. In this basic interpretation there are in turn two possibilities: either both or neither of
these relations can be envisioned as involving some sort of likeness. But to say that articulated
words are really like thoughts just as thoughts are like things quickly tends to break down
under analysis; this does not account for words in any one language that have the same meaning,
nor for words in different languages that are totally unlike each other in sound but that have the
same meaning.
But even if one holds that languages are largely conventional by the imposition of meaning on
terms, this does not settle the question about whether our thoughts are somehow like things.
Many philosophers have posited that there must be a realm of concepts in the mind as bearers of
meaning, but Wittgenstein and others have brought suspicion against treating thoughts as mental
representations for a variety of reasons. The preference of individuals like Putnam who have then
made the linguistic turn on this question is to focus on the public character of words so as to avoid
the perils of representationalism.

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Essays in Philosophy

To OCallaghan, however, this recourse to the public character of words begs the question of how
the mind is supposed to gain access to the extra-mental world. Such a position seems unfairly to
claim that we have some privileged access to one class of physical beings in the world (for the
public aspect of words and language refers to their physical presence with measurable duration and
volume, whether oral or written) as a way to mediate our cognitive relation to the rest of the
physical world to which we have no such access. But if the mind has no direct access to the
physical world and needs to have some kind of mediator, words and language cannot provide this
service any better than any other physical object.
As an alternative to the notion that in either both or neither of the relations one will find some sort
of likeness, OCallaghan prefers the Thomistic interpretation of Aristotle for its stress on the point
that the original text only speaks of a likeness between the passions of the soul and things and
that it does not speak of likeness but of sign to articulate the relation between words and
concepts. At considerable length he explicates Aquinass view that words can only come to have an
attachment to reality as conventional signs of what they signify because our cognitive powers are
embodied.
For Thomas the intellect has both an active aspect and a receptive aspect. The active dimension of
the intellect should not be understood as constructive of its concepts but as engaged in the
discernment of forms; the receptive dimension of the intellect (what the Aristotelian tradition likes
to call potential intellect or passive intellect) refers to the ways in which the mind itself is
changed by what we are coming to know. It is for this reason that Aquinas stresses the passions of
the soul in Aristotles text, and with Aristotle he repeatedly asserts that the mind becomes what is
known not by some substantial change in which the knower would cease to be a human being
but by a modification of its own proper potentiality, by intellectually taking into itself the forms that
structure the objects that we come to know.
What makes such an arrangement possible for Thomas, of course, is the metaphysical stance of
hylomorphism. If one were to envision the setting for the problem of how language maps onto
reality in the context of a materialist reduction of mind to matter or of an irreducible dualism of
mind and matter, the problem remains insoluble. Dualisms invariably produce the unbridgeable gap
that precludes ever getting beyond the comparison of one state of consciousness with another. The
reduction of mind to merely a particular arrangement of matter always has trouble accounting for
meaning at all.
What the Thomist requests, by contrast, is that one start by acknowledging that there is such a thing
as genuine knowledge and then proceed to ask how this is possible. The answer that the Thomist
proposes is that there must apparently be something as spiritual as mind already embodied as a
power or faculty of the same structural principle (the soul) that is animating the body, or else one
would never know anything. The mind should not be conceived as a separate substance in some
dualist relationship, but as a power of one and the same soul that animates the body; further, it is
crucial that the mind be regarded as receptive to reality even before it commences activity in its
own right. In this way Thomas can make his claim that we human knowers can know objects in the
world without creating, controlling, or altering them in the very process of knowing. The actions of
the body, including the words and language with which an individual comes to express what the
mind comes to know, belong to the means by which the corporeal expresses the spiritual.

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Essays in Philosophy

It is this point that brings us to the significance of the books subtitle: Toward a More Perfect
Form of Existence. Thus far we have focused entirely on the problem of how language maps onto
things, but the argument of the book at this juncture also points toward some important practical
considerations. By reflecting on the kind of activity that knowing is (namely, becoming like what
we know, intellectually taking on the forms of other things without losing our own distinctively
human form), we can recognize the way in which we increasingly transcend the material
dimensions of our existence and resemble a more perfect form of existence that entirely
transcends our limitations, the transcendence of God, who knows all by having made all there is to
know. And within the space of our interactions with one another, it is the unique capacities of being
able to map language onto the world that makes it possible for us to enjoy a more perfect form of
existence by our ethical and political choices.
In short, OCallaghans volume commits the bulk of its energies to constructing a sustained
argument about the deficiencies of prevalent patterns for approaching the problem of how words
express what we know about things. In proposing an alternative explanation, he attempts to fill in
those deficiencies by a richer metaphysics. And on the basis of the richer explanation he has
proposed, he can point to various levels of benefit that can accrue.
Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. Fordham University
_______________________________________________________________
Copyright 2004, Humboldt State University

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